Selected Exhibition

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A cursory glance at the diverse body of work produced during
Derek Hirst's long and prolific career could lead to the assessment
that he was an artist bent on defiant capriciousness. His paintings
are uniform only in their insistence on dramatic shifts of emphasis
and advocacy of a radically transforming visual language. At
different stages in an involved artistic mier, Hirst dedicated
attention to an exceptionally varied subject matter, whilst
deploying media ranging from oils, dyes and acrylic to less
conventional materials such as sand, plaster, rope, and dried
reeds. The style of his work, too, permutated from precisely
calculated, hard-edged colour to a luminous blending of surfaces
and tones.

From this inventory of difference, it is easy to conclude that
Hirst invested considerable impetus in a refusal to be 'pinned
down'. But the reality is quite the contrary. Being-in-the-world
and producing art that contained "every aspect of human passion and
mirror[ed] consciously, or unconsciously, as a seismograph might
measure the slightest earthly tremor, the events of the world" was
Hirst's ceaseless endeavour. His essential anchoring to place meant
that, beyond perfunctory appearances, Hirst's preoccupations and
passions remained constant, his work bound together by an unvarying
purpose. It is this dedication to evoking or (re)presenting place -
whether Catalonian earthy incandescence, the balanced formal beauty
of the Zen gardens of Kyoto or the coal-stained, snow-smudged
domestic landscapes of his native Doncaster - that provides
remarkable consistency in an apparently inconsistent oeuvre.